Mother Teresa

You probably remember what you were doing when you found out Princess Diana died, and when Heath Ledger died, and when Elvis died. You might remember when President Reagan died, or President Ford, or the Queen Mother. But do you remember when Mother Teresa died? Or Pope John Paul II? Why do we remember our celebrities most, our politicians somewhat, and our religious leaders never?

Mother Teresa died around the same time as Princess Di, and while conspiracy theories about about how the Princess lived and died are published daily in newspapers across the globe, Mother Teresa never seems to be talked about outside of the Catholic community. Well, I want to take a moment and remember a great woman, who dedicated her life to Christ, and served Him by helping the sick, destitute, and orphaned in her adopted country of India. Here are some excerpts from her Wiki article...

Mother Teresa was an Albanian-born Indian Roman Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata (Calcutta), India in 1950. For over forty years she ministered to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying, while guiding the Missionaries of Charity's expansion, first throughout India and then in other countries.

By the 1970s she had become internationally famed as a humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980 for her humanitarian work. Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity continued to expand, and at the time of her death it was operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counseling programs, orphanages, and schools.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia. She was the youngest of the children of a family from Shkodër, Albania, born to Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu. in her early years Agnes was fascinated by stories of the lives of missionaries and their service, and by age 12 was convinced that she should commit herself to a religious life. She left home at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto as a missionary. Agnes initially went to the Loreto Abbey in Ireland to learn English, the language the Sisters of Loreto used to teach school children in India. She arrived in India in 1929, and began her novitiate in Darjeeling, near the Himalayan mountains. She took her first religious vows as a nun on May 24, 1931. At that time she chose the name Teresa after Thérèse de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries. She took her solemn vows on May 14, 1937, while serving as a teacher at the Loreto convent school in eastern Calcutta.

On September 10, 1946, Teresa experienced what she later described as "the call within the call" while traveling to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling for her annual retreat. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith." She began her missionary work with the poor in 1948, replacing her traditional Loreto habit with a simple white cotton chira decorated with a blue border, adopted Indian citizenship, and ventured out into the slums." Initially she started a school in Motijhil; soon she started tending to the needs of the destitute and starving.

Teresa received Vatican permission on October 7, 1950 to start the diocesan congregation that would become the Missionaries of Charity. Its mission was to care for, in her own words, "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."

In 1982, at the height of the Siege of Beirut, Mother Teresa rescued 37 children trapped in a front line hospital by brokering a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas. Accompanied by Red Cross workers, she traveled through the war zone to the devastated hospital to evacuate the young patients. When Eastern Europe experienced increased openness in the late 1980s, she expanded her efforts to Communist countries that had previously rejected the Missionaries of Charity, embarking on dozens of projects. She was undeterred by criticism about her firm stand against abortion and divorce stating, "No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work." Mother Teresa traveled to assist and minister to the hungry in Ethiopia, radiation victims at Chernobyl, and earthquake victims in Armenia. In 1991, Mother Teresa returned for the first time to her homeland and opened a Missionaries of Charity Brothers home in Tirana, Albania. By 1996, she was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. Over the years, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity grew from twelve to thousands serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centers around the world.

Mother Teresa suffered a heart attack in Rome in 1983, while visiting Pope John Paul II. After a second attack in 1989, she received an artificial pacemaker. In 1991, after a battle with pneumonia while in Mexico, she suffered further heart problems. She offered to resign her position as head of the Missionaries of Charity. But the nuns of the order, in a secret ballot, voted for her to stay. Mother Teresa agreed to continue her work as head of the order. In April 1996, Mother Teresa fell and broke her collar bone. In August she suffered from malaria and failure of the left heart ventricle. She had heart surgery, but it was clear that her health was declining. On March 13, 1997, she stepped down from the head of Missionaries of Charity and died on September 5, 1997.

Following her death she was beatified by Pope John Paul II and given the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

I hope we all can live like her, spending our lives in service to our fellow man as a symbol of love and devotion to God, even if we don't get a Nobel Prize for it. My favorite Bible passage is in Matthew, where Jesus is telling the parable of the sheep and the goats. Jesus says that all who help the least of man in someway, are in fact service Jesus, and will join him in heaven, but those who ignore the least of man are ignoring Jesus, and will spend eternity in hell. I don't know about you, but I want to be counted as a sheep, not a goat. Let's all try to do something this week that is helpful to the poor, hungry, naked, homeless or inprisoned. Donate a couple dollars to a homeless shelter. Go through your closet, and donate all the clothes that no longer fit or you no longer like to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Take some non-perishable food to your local food bank. Be like Mother Teresa. But a stranger's needs ahead of your own, and worship God in service to your fellow man.

I don't mean to preach, and I don't mean to judge. I just feel called by God to raise awareness, and bring this message to the world. I pray that someone who happens upon this blog will read this, and do something kind for a stranger.

~~ The Wig